Choice is a wonderful thing. Informed Choice is even better, where you choose something after knowing its inside-outs. The very opposite of informed choice is dogma, where you rigidly oppose something and stick to your beliefs. Incidentally, dogma seems to be one of the significant factors keeping users away from embracing Windows Vista OS, of what can be inferred from an experiment by Microsoft in San Fransisco, United States. A group of Windows XP users having negative impressions on Windows Vista were introduced to a "new" operating system they referred to as "Mojave". User experiences on using this operating system were noted and feedback taken. A surprising 90 percent of these users gave positive feedback on this new OS. They were later told that the new OS was nothing else but Windows Vista.

Despite Microsoft releasing numerous updates and fixes to the Vista OS making it a fairly stable, reliable OS close to expectations if not exactly on par, it seems to be mass dogma that's keeping users away from adopting this new OS. Going back to that experiment, a user is reported to have exclaimed "Oh wow", something Microsoft expected users to do with the new OS originally, as portrayed in those numerous television and print commercials going with the tag line "wow". Following the recent announcement of a huge budget allocation towards propagating Vista (covered here) for home and enterprise segments, the message being sent out is that Microsoft is not only being aggressive but also proactive.Source: CNET

I wiped a windows XP PC during spring break (couldn't fix a bad install) and installed linux. Now I'm not too fond of linux (It's awesome if you don't like gaming. Very stable and not a single worry about viruses) and I'm saving up for vista (along with an e7200, crossfire mobo and a 4850) because I've owned both. Mom's PC has vista, and it's quite nice. Even with a geforce 6100 and 1gig of RAM, it runs fine. A little annoying with all the prompting for permission though. XD

Of course! We don't really speak English here in America. We speak American! We have all kind of words that make absolutely NO sense whatsoever! Arkansas (Ar-can-saw), Kansas (Can-says), no sense at all, so you folks in the UK don't even try to figure it out since many Americans can't seem to! You guys definitely have the market cornered in the English language! :)

LindseyM_WindowsTeam said:My name is Lindsey and I work with the Windows Vista team. I would be happy to share our customer videos from the Mojave Experiment. They can be found at MojaveExperiment.com.

To show that the word from people that know tech made them think that vista is really bad.

The no back folder button really pisses me off that it is now gone. Me and my boss scream about it all the time. It's one of the main things that we hate about vista, besides the new start menu and UAC.

thoughtdisorder said:Of course! We don't really speak English here in America. We speak American! We have all kind of words that make absolutely NO sense whatsoever! Arkansas (Ar-can-saw), Kansas (Can-says), no sense at all, so you folks in the UK don't even try to figure it out since many Americans can't seem to! You guys definitely have the market cornered in the English language! :)

LindseyM_WindowsTeam said:My name is Lindsey and I work with the Windows Vista team. I would be happy to share our customer videos from the Mojave Experiment. They can be found at MojaveExperiment.com.

Sorry but we arent stupid people here. Care to share why government agecies, places of learning, businesses, why they all refuse to "upgrade" to Vista? Allow me to fill that one in for you in simple points.

- Vista is a resource hog

Completely clean install it ate 800-900MB of DRAM on my system equipped with 2GB.. only after extensive services tweaking did it come down to a more acceptable 512MB. I can run XP with everything my system requires and 3-4 relatively memory hungry apps and just be peaking 600MB or so.

- Unstable

Crashes every 17.5hrs or so, yes, wonderful stability there having to reset once a day :rolleyes:

- Bloated

Seriously, who wants bloody gigs of drivers on their HDD for crap they will never own? Get real.

- Inferior gaming performance vs. XP

Please dont try to deny this you will force me to school you using Crysis as the model.

- The fact (most; ie; the normal user) have to HEAVILY upgrade their system to run Vista to any real acceptable standard.

- No hardware support for soundcards

Turning peoples £200+ cards into something thats little better than an onboard AC97 solution is just retarded. Again I expect no comeback on this, otherwise you will force me to brief you in detail about such things like the Alchemy project and why the Alchemy project had to come about.

- The god awful GUI

Why break something that was perfectly set up? Its lunacy to mess with things that didnt need messing with in the first place.

Now, leaving the obvious flaws of Vista aside for this post, I HAVE used Vista, before and after SP1, regardless Vista sucked (resource hog, bloated, insanely slow at copying files vs. XP, etc) and I put it to you, in fact I heartily encourage you, to pick some of the knowledgeable folk running XP off of this forum and have them run Vista and get their feedback. No trickery (but lets be fair, the people you randomly had do that mojave experiment could not of been very tech savvy to not recognise Vista when they saw it), in a simple "Try Vista, and tell us what you do and don't like about it".

Now, leaving the obvious flaws of Vista aside for this post, I HAVE used Vista, before and after SP1, regardless Vista sucked (resource hog, bloated, insanely slow at copying files vs. XP, etc) and I put it to you, in fact I heartily encourage you, to pick some of the knowledgeable folk running XP off of this forum and have them run Vista and get their feedback. No trickery (but lets be fair, the people you randomly had do that mojave experiment could not of been very tech savvy to not recognise Vista when they saw it), in a simple "Try Vista, and tell us what you do and don't like about it".

Ketxxx said:Sorry but we arent stupid people here. Care to share why government agecies, places of learning, businesses, why they all refuse to "upgrade" to Vista? Allow me to fill that one in for you in simple points.

- Vista is a resource hog

Completely clean install it ate 800-900MB of DRAM on my system equipped with 2GB.. only after extensive services tweaking did it come down to a more acceptable 512MB. I can run XP with everything my system requires and 3-4 relatively memory hungry apps and just be peaking 600MB or so.

- Unstable

Crashes every 17.5hrs or so, yes, wonderful stability there having to reset once a day :rolleyes:

- Bloated

Seriously, who wants bloody gigs of drivers on their HDD for crap they will never own? Get real.

- Inferior gaming performance vs. XP

Please dont try to deny this you will force me to school you using Crysis as the model.

- The fact (most; ie; the normal user) have to HEAVILY upgrade their system to run Vista to any real acceptable standard.

- No hardware support for soundcards

Turning peoples £200+ cards into something thats little better than an onboard AC97 solution is just retarded. Again I expect no comeback on this, otherwise you will force me to brief you in detail about such things like the Alchemy project and why the Alchemy project had to come about.

- The god awful GUI

Why break something that was perfectly set up? Its lunacy to mess with things that didnt need messing with in the first place.

agree with resource hog bit but that happened to xp as well, unstabel .. I have to disagree since mines never crashes unless im overclocking in which case xp does as well. Bloated - same with xp, inferior gaming performance ... 1 fps is not a make or break for a gaming experience, no idea about the soundcard thing and the GUI is your opinion not a fact.

DrPepper said:agree with resource hog bit but that happened to xp as well, unstabel .. I have to disagree since mines never crashes unless im overclocking in which case xp does as well. Bloated - same with xp, inferior gaming performance ... 1 fps is not a make or break for a gaming experience, no idea about the soundcard thing and the GUI is your opinion not a fact.

Agree w/ you on all that, I love the GUI, and find vista to be more stable and faster than xp. I really don't care if xp can run a game 7fps faster than vista, if it's unplayable then I'll get a new graphics card, I prefer eye candy. Sound I have heard issues about, haven't really had any myself as I use onboard w/ mid-range speakers, but the lack of a equalizer irritates me. Although, I think that's more of the companies who make the sound drivers problems, not microsoft's. If I was to say anything negative about vista though that'd be it probably though. Bloated? Again, why is having a stripped down os favorable to a more functional one?

farlex85 said:Agree w/ you on all that, I love the GUI, and find vista to be more stable and faster than xp. I really don't care if xp can run a game 7fps faster than vista, if it's unplayable then I'll get a new graphics card, I prefer eye candy. Sound I have heard issues about, haven't really had any myself as I use onboard w/ mid-range speakers, but the lack of a equalizer irritates me. Although, I think that's more of the companies who make the sound drivers problems, not microsoft's. If I was to say anything negative about vista though that'd be it probably though. Bloated? Again, why is having a stripped down os favorable to a more functional one?

It all boils down to someone's experience of the os. For example if I installed linux and had issues such as no network drivers or no graphics driver support I would not use it but someone else might have drivers for thier network and graphics and then enjoyed using it because they found it stable.

farlex85 said:Agree w/ you on all that, I love the GUI, and find vista to be more stable and faster than xp. I really don't care if xp can run a game 7fps faster than vista, if it's unplayable then I'll get a new graphics card, I prefer eye candy. Sound I have heard issues about, haven't really had any myself as I use onboard w/ mid-range speakers, but the lack of a equalizer irritates me. Although, I think that's more of the companies who make the sound drivers problems, not microsoft's. If I was to say anything negative about vista though that'd be it probably though. Bloated? Again, why is having a stripped down os favorable to a more functional one?

It's about efficient coding. We don't need 3 gigs of actual windows files to do the work of what should take 500 megs, you know?

The audio issue is that games can't use direct sound. It now has to be emulated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
They took a perfectly good system and flat out killed it. I liken it to having opengl then making shitX, especially 11. Except you get zero hardware benefit. Really good stuff, M$, thanks. Dicks.

TheGuruStud said:Ummm, last time I checked, that isn't American. It may be Americanized, but I think the long gone Native Americans hold title to many of our names. :)

very true - and the further towards the east coast you go, the more prevailant and widespread the use of native american terms become

ketxxxSorry but we arent stupid people here. Care to share why government agecies, places of learning, businesses, why they all refuse to "upgrade" to Vista? Allow me to fill that one in for you in simple points.

- Vista is a resource hog

Completely clean install it ate 800-900MB of DRAM on my system equipped with 2GB.. only after extensive services tweaking did it come down to a more acceptable 512MB. I can run XP with everything my system requires and 3-4 relatively memory hungry apps and just be peaking 600MB or so.

- Unstable

Crashes every 17.5hrs or so, yes, wonderful stability there having to reset once a day

- Bloated

Seriously, who wants bloody gigs of drivers on their HDD for crap they will never own? Get real.

- Inferior gaming performance vs. XP

Please dont try to deny this you will force me to school you using Crysis as the model.

- The fact (most; ie; the normal user) have to HEAVILY upgrade their system to run Vista to any real acceptable standard.

- No hardware support for soundcards

Turning peoples £200+ cards into something thats little better than an onboard AC97 solution is just retarded. Again I expect no comeback on this, otherwise you will force me to brief you in detail about such things like the Alchemy project and why the Alchemy project had to come about.

- The god awful GUI

Why break something that was perfectly set up? Its lunacy to mess with things that didnt need messing with in the first place.

Now, leaving the obvious flaws of Vista aside for this post, I HAVE used Vista, before and after SP1, regardless Vista sucked (resource hog, bloated, insanely slow at copying files vs. XP, etc) and I put it to you, in fact I heartily encourage you, to pick some of the knowledgeable folk running XP off of this forum and have them run Vista and get their feedback. No trickery (but lets be fair, the people you randomly had do that mojave experiment could not of been very tech savvy to not recognise Vista when they saw it), in a simple "Try Vista, and tell us what you do and don't like about it".

I agree with you on most points you presented . . .

the sad thing, though, is that some of the bigger issues between XP/Vista can be fixed - DX10 can run on XP . . . and we could have audio hardware acceleration in Vista . . .

Vista, IMO, is currently no better than XP was when it was released, and after SP1. But, Vista gives me the impression of an OS that was ritzed up to compete with MAC, and userability had to fall sacrifice for this. You know how irritating it is to install an application, and then spend 45min trying to figure out why it doesn't want to run, only to realize you didn't install or run the application as "administrator?!" It gives me the impression that it was shoved out the door more half-baked than XP initially was . . . we still have software and hardware companies trying to get stable or "accepted" Vista drivers released . . . c'mon, driver support on the 3rd party side was bad enough that MS delayed the launch of the OS to give some big name companies time to finish developing drivers that the OS would cooperate with.

DrPepper said:It all boils down to someone's experience of the os. For example if I installed linux and had issues such as no network drivers or no graphics driver support I would not use it but someone else might have drivers for thier network and graphics and then enjoyed using it because they found it stable.

True words, no os is perfect for everyone, what works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. The same thing happens w/ brand bias. Someone has a good experience w/ one brand and a bad experience w/ the other and deems the one better than the other, while someone else may have a totally opposite experience. Really both brands end up being nearly the same, distinguishable only by personal preference.

TheGuruStud said:It's about efficient coding. We don't need 3 gigs of actual windows files to do the work of what should take 500 megs, you know?

The audio issue is that games can't use direct sound. It now has to be emulated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
They took a perfectly good system and flat out killed it. I liken it to having opengl then making shitX, especially 11. Except you get zero hardware benefit. Really good stuff, M$, thanks. Dicks.

You may be right about inefficient coding, I've heard it before. I, however, don't really buy it from my experience w/ vista (seems faster, more efficient, more responsive, speaking from a qualitative standpoint). I don't know enough about it to say for sure either way though.

farlex85 said:Agree w/ you on all that, I love the GUI, and find vista to be more stable and faster than xp. I really don't care if xp can run a game 7fps faster than vista, if it's unplayable then I'll get a new graphics card, I prefer eye candy. Sound I have heard issues about, haven't really had any myself as I use onboard w/ mid-range speakers, but the lack of a equalizer irritates me. Although, I think that's more of the companies who make the sound drivers problems, not microsoft's. If I was to say anything negative about vista though that'd be it probably though. Bloated? Again, why is having a stripped down os favorable to a more functional one?

the audio issue I've beaten into the ground with Vista . . .

but seeing as how I don't want to get up on my soapbox about that again - all I'll say is that with onboard audio, the OS seems to be more integrated with it. If you have HD onboard that is capable of 7.1+, there are no down sampling or down mixing issues that I know of, unless you're running 3rd party applications (i.e. PowerDVD). If all you're using is media center, your audio will function correctly, perfectly, and correct.

But, if you're running an audio adapter, be warned that there are issues no matter what the hardware manufacturer - downsampling and downmixing is common, converting 5.1 to 2-channel. No hardware acceleration, amoungst other things.

This all boils down to the audio architecture, and how the audio APIs within the kernel are designed to carryout hardware calls.

And the sad part is, MS was working with a couple other companies to impliment DirectSound support into the DX10 package . . . but after one of their partners dropped the project, so did MS . . .:shadedshu

but seeing as how I don't want to get up on my soapbox about that again - all I'll say is that with onboard audio, the OS seems to be more integrated with it. If you have HD onboard that is capable of 7.1+, there are no down sampling or down mixing issues that I know of, unless you're running 3rd party applications (i.e. PowerDVD). If all you're using is media center, your audio will function correctly, perfectly, and correct.

But, if you're running an audio adapter, be warned that there are issues no matter what the hardware manufacturer - downsampling and downmixing is common, converting 5.1 to 2-channel. No hardware acceleration, amoungst other things.

This all boils down to the audio architecture, and how the audio APIs within the kernel are designed to carryout hardware calls.

And the sad part is, MS was working with a couple other companies to impliment DirectSound support into the DX10 package . . . but after one of their partners dropped the project, so did MS . . .:shadedshu

Yeah I'm not too well versed in the technical audio area, so I only half know what your talking about (not exactly sure what down sampling sounds like), but I know you know your stuff in this department. Like I said, the only negative sound thing I've encountered is the realtek drivers for vista don't include an equalizer, while they do on xp, I don't really understand why that is, but I have a hunch that's realtek not ms. Overall I can't really distinguish any faults in the sound though. I do plan on upgrading my sound card eventually w/ some nice speakers, so I will have to do some extensive research in this area before hand to avoid as much of this as possible, any chance you could throw in some sort of vista audio guide to your understanding audio guide?

farlex85 said:Yeah I'm not too well versed in the technical audio area, so I only half know what your talking about, but I know you know your stuff in this department. Like I said, the only negative sound thing I've encountered is the realtek drivers for vista don't include an equalizer, while they do on xp, I don't really understand why that is, but I have a hunch that's realtek not ms. Overall I can't really distinguish any faults in the sound though. I do plan on upgrading my sound card eventually w/ some nice speakers, so I will have to do some extensive research in this area before hand to avoid as much of this as possible, any chance you could throw in some sort of vista audio guide to your understanding audio guide?

as to the realtek with no EQ . . . yeah, that's RealTek :shadedshu

although, Analogue Devices (ADI) isn't much better; their SoundMAX drivers for this motherboard don't include an EQ and some other stuff for XP . . . but they do for Vista :wtf:

When you plan on upgrading to an audio card for Vista, I'm more than willing to give unbiased recomendations or answer any questions :toast:

as to the guide - yeah, I intend to add more to it at some point. Seeing as how the Vista upgrade is looking inevitable next month (STALKER: Clear Sky - w00t! :rockout:), and I don't feel like running into any issues with the current mod process of getting DX10 to run seamlessly with XP (although it appears the project is still being worked on).

So, I'll start getting some more in depth field work with audio in Vista, and I'll be adding to the audio guide, as well as the X-Fi thread. Possibly, if it turns into a big enough ordeal, I might voodoo up another guide solely for audio in Vista.

although, Analogue Devices (ADI) isn't much better; their SoundMAX drivers for this motherboard don't include an EQ and some other stuff for XP . . . but they do for Vista :wtf:

Actually, ADI does have some good drivers, but guess what, you have to hunt for them.
If you get the new versions from Asus by searching under newer MBs (intel chipsets seem to be a good place to start), then you can find drivers released this yr and with the equalizer, etc. In fact, for adi 1988, you need to use 1988b drivers b/c they work the best. The only issue I've had now is that digital doesn't output in 5.1 (I had it working ONCE and it won't work again).

Any newer realtek drivers should be good, too. Or I'd use the nvidia drivers if you can.

TheGuruStud said:Actually, ADI does have some good drivers, but guess what, you have to hunt for them.
If you get the new versions from Asus by searching under newer MBs (intel chipsets seem to be a good place to start), then you can find drivers released this yr and with the equalizer, etc. In fact, for adi 1988, you need to use 1988b drivers b/c they work the best. The only issue I've had now is that digital doesn't output in 5.1 (I had it working ONCE and it won't work again).

I've gotten the ones from ASUS - but I'm not too concerned with it ATM. I had only enabled the onboard for testing purposes, and for hardware comparisons to an audio adapter.